"Spectre"

Not "SPECTRE" apparently, because here the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion seems to have no acronym and just be a bunch of people called 'Spectre' who aren't very nice.

Now Blofeld's back, surely Baron Samedi
is next on the 'villains to revive' list.

My review of Skyfall seems all too applicable to Spectre in some respects. I've yet to rewatch Skyfall (and I have little desire to do so, to be honest) but my primary objections to it haven't mellowed over time: I think it's fundamentally a rather pretentious film which absurdly expects me to take the character of James Bond seriously and care about his problems. As I stated in that review, I think treating Bond like a drama is inherently nonsensical, because it's a genre franchise about a larger-than-life character in almost wholly unrealistic situations, and therefore his feelings, thoughts and inner life fundamentally offer little for the audience to reflect upon.

Bond 25: Bond Has A Nice Cup Of Tea

The writers and directors of modern genre films need to realise that they are not writing the next great English/American novel, and that the nature of their medium innately precludes such aspirations from being sensible. The same delusions of dramatic grandeur affect current British television properties like modern Doctor Who and Sherlock, shows which similarly offer pointless masturbatory ruminations on the nature of unreal and unrealistic characters as if they have to compete with "literary" art.

Spectre is not as egregious in this as Skyfall was, but it suffers from many of the same problems: it's slow and dry, it's boring-looking, with a grey- and brown-dominated colour palette, and it's not shot or designed in a particularly interesting way. It feels more grounded in its own action than Skyfall admittedly, with a less dreamlike tone, but this accentuates its dryness. This is also emphasised by the fact that the plot is extremely unoriginal.

"Yeah, I'm all right."

Large parts of the plot of Spectre are extremely similar, if not identical to, 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, another dry and unexciting film. Consider this: in both films, the security agency (SHIELD, the Joint Intelligence Service) has a new headquarters in the nation's capital (by a body of water, even). It's revealed that the head of said agency (Pierce, C) is in fact allied with or a part of a nefarious secret organisation (HYDRA, Spectre) which wants to use the legitimate organisation to take over a massive surveillance network (Project Insight, Nine Eyes) to get up to mischief. A rag-tag team of surviving "good" members of the original organisation (Fury/Widow/Falcon/Maria Hill, M/Moneypenny/Q/Tanner) must infiltrate the new, compromised headquarters while the protagonist has a "personal" showdown with the film's other main antagonist with whom he has an almost fraternal connection (Bucky, Oberhauser). I felt like I'd seen a good deal of this before. Bucky and Oberhauser are both meant to have died in the snow only to have actually survived, for goodness' sake.

Good thing we all wear these suspicious rings
with this very retro-looking logo on them.

Now let's get to the main attraction: Spectre itself and Blofeld. I didn't think these were handled effectively. Having finally regained the rights, they shoot their bolt almost immediately by introducing the whole shebang: Spectre is this evil organisation which manipulates world events and their mysterious unseen leader is a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Note that in the original Bond films, SPECTRE and Blofeld were dealt with over no less than six films. SPECTRE is first introduced in Dr. No as the titular villain's employer. In From Russia With Love they try to exacerbate tensions between East and West. Following an unrelated diversion for Goldfinger, Bond then deals with the second-in-command of the organisation, Emilio Largo, in Thunderball. It's not until You Only Live Twice that Bond finally meets Blofeld himself, and it takes that film and two more, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to finally deal with Blofeld and put an end to the entire situation. In fact, apart from Goldfinger, the entire Connery/Lazenby era involves SPECTRE in some shape or other.

"Seat belts on, please!"

That's a hell of a lot of story, and it makes SPECTRE seem appropriately sprawling and mysterious - octopoid, like its logo. And while some of SPECTRE's and/or Blofeld's activities are very over the top and have become clichés, like the volcano lair and the laser satellite, generally their motivations were fairly clear: to play the superpowers of the Cold War against each other for money and power. That's what SPECTRE is, essentially, in those films: a very elaborate criminal organisation. Yet at the same time it functions as a reflection and even a parody of the very powers it is playing: all of Bond's spying and all of the espionage and struggles between Western governments and the Soviet Union for political and economic supremacy are ultimately little different, in those stories' eyes, to the actions of criminals manipulating affairs for the sake of profit and control. Note that in Blofeld's fish tank in From Russia With Love, all three (the West, the USSR and SPECTRE) are the same creature.

Not so here, of course. The Cold War's long over (arguably), or has at least transformed, which leaves one wondering what SPECTRE's purpose really is. What do they get from the human trafficking, from the fake pharmaceuticals they apparently sell, from the elaborate surveillance network they intend to take over? It's all very unclear, and it seems as if the film can't really come up with a good reason for Spectre's existence in the "post 9/11 world", as opposed to the world of the Cold War, much in the same way that HYDRA's role in The Winter Soldier in my opinion lacked impact. Spectre seem menacing with their elaborate Rome meeting, but we don't have enough time to really see them do anything. The film tries to do far too much. Their most threatening element seems to be this bulky henchman with no neck who is apparently immune to punches, who seems to be intended as comparable to Red Grant or a similar figure but feels like an arbitrary stooge for Bond to have a difficult fight with.

"James, don't you remember how you shot my face off during The War?"

Let's turn finally to Blofeld himself. It's this which gives Spectre similar levels of pretension and delusions of grandeur equivalent to that of Skyfall. In that we saw Bond under siege in his old family home; here Blofeld is the pseudonym of Franz Oberhauser, who knew Bond as a child when his father looked after Bond for a couple of years when his parents died. Oberhauser apparently murdered his own father out of jealousy and faked his own death, before renaming himself Blofeld and establishing Spectre.

In my opinion, it's all far too personal. We learn all this "backstory", but nothing actually substantial about this new Blofeld, apart from the fact that he's clearly a patricidal psychopath. What else does he want? Why did he establish Spectre? What's he been up to for all these years? Most of all, how did he, as he claims, manipulate events behind the scenes in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall when all of those films already explained themselves? Spectre tries to establish itself as some kind of shocking resolution to the "Daniel Craig tetralogy", but does so by simply telling us that it is and expecting us to believe it. We constantly hear references to past characters: Vesper, Le Chiffre, Greene, Silva and the like, but Spectre has no way of actually establishing any of the narrative connections it claims because they don't exist, which gives Blofeld's claim to being "the author of all your pain" (Bond's, that is) no substance or profundity whatsoever. Oberhauser even states that he only started going after Bond because he got in his way, which makes the plot revelation of their shared past completely unnecessary and irrelevant; it doesn't provide either of them with motivation, and is only there to shock the audience with the largely meaningless concept that Bond and his traditional arch-enemy knew each other for a couple of years as kids. So what? The film does nothing with it, so why should we care? But we're meant to care simply because the connection exists, and in this way the film treats the audience like gasping idiots who will swallow any twist, no matter how trivial, purely because it is a twist.

Land, no.

The older films were from an age where everything didn't have to be "personal" and Hollywood action films weren't incompetently striving to involve novelistic characterisation and discourse in modes for which they were completely unsuited. Blofeld was there characterised perfectly well: as a ruthless, cynical man who toyed with the lives of the whole world simply for his own personal profit. In Spectre it's simply not clear what Blofeld wants or why he is the way he is: he describes himself as a "visionary" of sorts but we're never informed of his vision; I don't know why he particularly cares to torture Bond the way he does unless he's simply some kind of sadist. The weak "personal connection" element and the need to rush through the character wastes Christoph Waltz in an admittedly rather unimaginatively cast role, in which the character and his organisation seem to exist not for the sake of the story but so that Bond fans will recognise the names and be titillated. While I think the "personal connection" aspect was unnecessary and doesn't really work for Bond in any event, there was no need for either the Spectre organisation or Blofeld himself to have a role in the film. The character is simply not very interesting, being not as visually striking as Donald Pleasence's Blofeld, not as effective a foil for Bond as Telly Savalas', and not as amusing as Charles Gray's (my personal favourite).

Everything else is fairly bland, as I've already stated. The most visually interesting part of the film is the Day of the Dead sequence in the beginning. There's nothing else that is particularly glamorous in terms of location or activity. The script contains a few chuckles, but not much. Daniel Craig puts in a workmanlike performance as Bond, but he's not especially interesting to watch for most of the time. Bond girl Madeleine Swann is okay as this instalment's "reasonably competent female deuteragonist" but nothing too memorable. Ralph Fiennes as M mostly has to do a lot of the grouching and grumbling that I thought was subverted as the best element of Skyfall. The final capture of Blofeld by Bond simply shooting his helicopter (something which consistently fails to succeed in almost every Bond film) was a little anticlimactic.

For your cool, cool glasses only.

In terms of good parts, the pre-titles sequence in Mexico City isn't bad at all, featuring characterful location work and a frantic punch-up in a helicopter. I don't mind the song for this one, and the title sequence itself was okay, even if the octopus motif was rather laboured. I was glad that they used M more effectively towards the end. As I said before, there are a few humorous moments, including from Craig himself. Other than that I didn't find much that was particularly engaging about it.

Assuming Daniel Craig doesn't do another Bond, it's disappointing that he's essentially three for four in terms of mediocre films (although admittedly a lot of people thought Skyfall was good for whatever reason). I think the explanation for this, however, almost lies in the fact that Craig was cast for Casino Royale, which is in my opinion a good film which worked perfectly well on its own terms, and in which the chemistry of Craig and Eva Green was ideal for a striking standalone Bond film which didn't need and couldn't benefit from sequels or follow-ups. It's possible that the tenets established for Casino Royale, such as a more serious tone, arguably more realism, more emotional drama and the like, have in fact burdened the rest of the Craig era because they were invented for the sake and success of that single film and not for an entire sequence of films. In that sense it's possible that the last three films were doomed from the start.

"Well, if we destroy Kansas the world may not hear about it for years."

Daniel Craig may be departing, but the great success of Skyfall and the relatively substantial success of Spectre mean that we're probably likely to see more of this kind of thing in the future, unfortunately. It would be appealing if the Bond franchise could recapture a little of the colour, glamour and energy of days gone by but I doubt they'll bother. It's disheartening to say it, but it seems unlikely that we'll see that kind of Bond film made again. "Blofeld" may have been spared, but it's possible that Bond is, in many ways, dead.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

"Remember kids, the minimum requirement for wearing a helmet
is jumping out of a low-flying aircraft. Don't bother with one when,
say, riding a big heavy motorcycle, for instance."

Ed Brubaker's essential run writing Captain America from 2005 to 2012 was always a prime candidate for adaptation, being one of the most memorable and innovative periods for the character in recent years. Most crucial to this era was Brubaker's resurrection of Cap's long-dead sidekick Bucky as the Winter Soldier, a brainwashed and regularly-hibernated Soviet assassin who had, through conditioning and mind control, operated against his country of origin for many years. He eventually comes into the control of the Red Skull, who has used a Cosmic Cube (the "Tesseract" of the film universe) to cheat death at the last minute by transferring his consciousness into the mind of Russian businessman Aleksander Lukin, the Winter Soldier's current owner, who had in fact been attempting to use the Soldier to kill the Skull himself. In the course of the story Cap encounters his former friend numerous times, finally using the Cosmic Cube to restore Bucky's memory and original personality in order to break his handlers' control over him. In the course of the story, Cap had to confront his past, and eventually Bucky did as well. Featuring Cap, Bucky, Red Skull, Arnim Zola, Sharon Carter, Falcon, Baron Zemo, flashbacks to the war and to long-past Captain America storylines like "Secret Empire" and "The Grand Director" it's a loving tribute to the history of the character as well as shaking up the formula and telling a compelling story of its own. It's a pretty good example of serialised comic book fiction done right.

"Mr Pierce, please stop staring at my massive belt buckle."

I guessed that the second Captain America film would bear the subtitle "The Winter Soldier" and I wasn't wrong. My review of "Captain America: The First Avenger" is more negative than I really feel about that film now. I rewatch it somewhat regularly, and I'm actually very fond of it. As such I was hopeful that "The Winter Soldier" would be a worthy sequel to "The First Avenger." That being said, having seen trailers, I was not entirely optimistic. "The Winter Soldier" looked to me like it was going to be a fairly generic action film, and unfortunately that's more or less exactly what I think it ended up being. As far as sequels go, it's superior in my opinion to "Iron Man 2", not a difficult task, and probably on more or less the same level as "Thor: The Dark World." I thought that "The Dark World" didn't start well but ended reasonably effectively. The opposite is more or less true in this case. In my opinion "The Winter Soldier" has a strong opening act but doesn't sustain it all the way through, and to avoid a disjointed and rambling review, I'll give my feelings on why this is the case first before examining what I thought were the memorable and effective elements of the film.

"Who the Buck is Fu- wait..."

The Winter Soldier

Perhaps the greatest issue I have with the film is that the titular Winter Soldier is introduced too late in the film, isn't given sufficient attention, and never has his narrative resolved in the scope of the on-screen narrative. He first appears as a sinister henchman of Alexander Pierce, the film's main villain, and only after several encounters is revealed to be Bucky, Cap's presumed-deceased friend of decades earlier. This is much like the comics, but a film doesn't have the time allocation a comic series does. We get scraps of backstory - the implication is that in this continuity he was resurrected not by the Soviets but by HYDRA - but by the end of the film, after his confrontation with Steve, he never actually recovers his identity. We don't get any closure on the situation, and it's in fact left hanging for a sequel. Personally I found this to be rather bizarre. Cap doesn't even get much time in the film to attempt to deal with discovering the survival of his friend or the state he has been in for the last seventy years or so. I think that had they focused more on the Winter Soldier himself, perhaps with the revelation of his identity early in the second act rather than at its conclusion, we might have been able to tell a more personal story. It ends up, however, being Cap fighting to save the world rather than to save Bucky, and I feel like the film doesn't play to the strengths of its narrative in that regard. That being said, perhaps it's a story almost impossible to tell effectively in the scope of a single feature film. In addition, straggly longish hair and overgrown stubble really don't suit Sebastian Stan, who deprived of his mask looks a bit like an adolescent who's responding to recently finishing school by rarely shaving or getting a haircut. I would have preferred a more sinister clean-cut look with the original domino mask. The rest of the costume's fine, though, and the bionic arm's done well, although in this adaptation the Soviet star on the shoulder is rather inexplicable.

 

HYDRA

Hello, old sport.

This is my other major objection with the story. The main problem with the storyline as it stands is that instead of simply having it focused on Cap's objections to an increasingly intrusive, paranoid and ruthless SHIELD, this quality has to be attributed instead to HYDRA, the Red Skull's evil organisation from the previous film, which infiltrated SHIELD upon the incorporation of Arnim Zola and others into its power structure. My main issues with this are twofold: firstly in reference to the previous film, where HYDRA seemed to largely be a vehicle for the Red Skull to enact his own rather personal designs of megalomania and where Zola himself seemed to have very little personal investment in the cause, and secondly because I don't think we need a sinister conspiracy for this storyline to work. I actually would have preferred Cap to cut ties with SHIELD because of things SHIELD was doing entirely legitimately. I think this would have given the surveillance issue far more bite than simply attributing an evil scheme to an obviously evil organisation. While I appreciate that HYDRA is an ongoing presence in the actual Marvel comics universe, I also feel that this ties the narrative too closely to the plot of the previous film instead of telling something new. I didn't like the idea that HYDRA was responsible for things like Howard Stark's death, and generally thought the betrayal from within was a bit of a cliché, not unlike Stane's betrayal of Stark in "Iron Man". It all seemed excessively orchestrated. It also limits the impact of the Winter Soldier's already truncated storyline. I think it would have been more interesting to see Cap dealing with how the random accumulation of events can cause a situation to spiral out of control. It probably owes something to the "Secret Empire" storyline of the 70s, but that was effective because it tapped into America's anxiety about its own leadership after Watergate by implying that the President himself was the real villain. Using fictional organisations like SHIELD and HYDRA instead of the US Government, the Soviets and so on makes the story feel a bit toothless in my opinion, sort of like HYDRA substituting for the actual Nazis in the previous film. Pierce isn't a very memorable villain to my mind, and with Winter Soldier as just a stooge I would have preferred a proper Cap villain like Baron Zemo or Strucker, who appeared altogether distinctively and memorably in the mid-credits sequence, as someone against whom Cap could face off.

Hopefully he's getting too old for this.

Supporting Cast

At times this film feels more like "Avengers One and a Half." We have Cap, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, SHIELD agents and the introduction of new characters Falcon and Agent 13. Pierce is observed to be a character basically outranking Nick Fury who has an enforcer loosely based on the Crossbones character from the comic, which almost makes the Winter Soldier feel unnecessary. Black Widow is okay as a supporting character for Cap, but given her presence in the film Falcon seems a bit redundant, Hill moreso. Poor old Scarlett Johansson sadly has to slip back into the same tight catsuit, a bad wig and the familiar old role of being exploited on film with, for example, an egregious posterior shot and an even more egregious bosom shot that comes out of nowhere towards the end. While the character works effectively as a foil for Cap, at times I found her exasperatingly dry. Falcon's fine, but doesn't undergo much development, and as I've said feels a touch redundant, and his storyline helping other retired soldiers deal with civilian life doesn't seem to pay off much. Robin, I mean Maria Hill, seems basically there for the sake of someone to operate the computer at the end, and there's a missed opportunity for some Bechdel-passing dialogue between her and Widow. As for Nick Fury, I could do without him. I feel like we're meant to think that Samuel L. Jackson is this cool "badass" but frankly I find him typecast and dull. The most underutilised presence is undoubtedly Emily VanCamp as Agent 13. She's set up as Cap's new love interest but never really gets to do anything. Poor Hayley Atwell also has to get slathered in old lady makeup in a cliché old, bedridden scene with Steve. Some of these characters probably needed to be dropped to give the others room to breathe.

General Constructive Comments

CANNONBAAAALL!

The film in my opinion is just too busy. I don't think we have enough time to show Cap dealing with modern life, which already didn't get that much time in "The Avengers", or to introduce Falcon and establish his relationship with Cap, deal with SHIELD being taken over by HYDRA, give the numerous other secondary protagonists much attention and deal with what's notionally the film's chief focus, the Winter Soldier. As I've said, I would have largely dropped the SHIELD elements - at times it feels like "SHIELD: The Film" - and presented a more personal story for Cap about his efforts to find his place in the modern world, having to deal with the revival of his friend as a mindless killer. Otherwise, I would have just had Cap dealing with SHIELD. I think the film tries to have two main plots and in the end the more interesting one, the Winter Soldier, gets shafted for the more ticket-selling one, the action extravaganza of a SHIELD civil war. There are too many interchangeable urban action scenes, the ending is a pretty routine CGI-'em-up with three giant airships firing hundreds of shots at each other and it feels too constrained to the SHIELD Triskelion. The pacing is too frantic, eschewing more opportunities for breathing room which I think would have made things more poignant. This is a film which tries to do too much and ends up unfulfilled in each element. And seriously, how many times have we seen movie terrorists cause big multi-car pileups on highways? And what's with the bit where Steve calls out HYDRA over the radio? Didn't he consider that publicly announcing to the loyal SHIELD agents what was going on would probably start a massive, confused, treacherous battle where loads of them would get killed? The evacuation shot where crowds are running in three different directions like headless chickens was pretty risible too.

Well that's enough of what I thought didn't work in the film. So what did I like?

The Opening and other quiet moments

I thought the film started quite well. I liked that we started with Cap himself and I felt like Falcon was introduced effectively. I thought Washington was a visually unique setting and I enjoyed Cap visiting the Smithsonian exhibit, as well as the general feeling of his efforts to live in the modern world. The film was actually most successful, I think, in the scenes shot in the evening, which I felt gave the environment a particular atmosphere equivalent to some degree to the historical setting of the previous film. I quite liked the part where Cap and Widow went to the Apple store to investigate their information, even if the product placement was pretty blatant, and the scene in the car where Steve and Natasha were driving out to Camp Lehigh was a massively important piece of, as I keep saying, breathing room in a film with an enormous quantity of action scenes. In this regard I appreciated the moments where Steve seemed alone or isolated, relying on his convictions where the authorities and hierarchy had failed.

"Uh... it was you."

Captain America himself

In 2011 I thought that Chris Evans was well-cast as Captain America, and this film didn't change that opinion. Captain America is portrayed as a sincere, decent, moral person in a world gone mad with similar effectiveness to the previous film and once again Chris Evans provided a believable sense of a humble, self-deprecating character whose greatest strengths are his loyalty to his own aforementioned convictions and his ability to bring out that side in others. He has a good rapport with the rest of the cast, and I think that his scenes were almost always the strongest. He provides a solid, dependable core to the film much like the Captain himself.

Arnim Zola

Apart from the other scenes I've mentioned, one of my favourite moments in the film was when Cap and Widow discover the enormous 1970s-style old fashioned computer room where the intelligence of Arnim Zola was stored. Not only was this scene incredibly atmospheric, it also paid homage to the character's nature in the comics in an interesting way that wasn't managed in the previous film. I appreciated both the design and, despite the implausibility of the situation, the realistically huge amount of antiquated technology implied to be necessary to achieve something that the film depicts in modern times with holograms and clouds of light out of nowhere.

Essential Line

The exchange:

"Bucky?"

"Who the hell is 'Bucky'?"

is mandatory dialogue from the original comic so I'm glad it was retained in this.

Sky Captain meets The Spirit?

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" isn't a terrible film but I think it's a film which doesn't recognise its own strengths and suffers as a result. As objectionable as many would find this complaint, there's too much action, or the action scenes are too repetitious. The attack on Fury on the streets, for instance, feels too similar to the attack on Cap, Widow and Falcon later in the film. The airborne finale feels too similar to the finale of the first film. This is a film which would have benefited from a deeper focus on a smaller cast, greater selectivity of narrative, and more moderated pacing to allow for moments of introspection. I often complain about modern cinema and TV prioritising character too far ahead of plot. This is a film which puts plot too far ahead of character. It's a little cold and lacking atmosphere except in the few scenes I already mentioned, the ending is a bit "forced climax" and too routine as a big battle full of CGI explosions. My opinion on the first film changed as well, so I'm prepared to change my mind about this one, but at the moment I'm not convinced that it's much more than a fairly generic action film or that it really lives up to the praise it has thus far received elsewhere.